"Everything divine runs with light feet."
Surely the chief delight of going away from home is the joy of getting back again. I shall never forget that spring morning when I walked from the city of Kilburn into the open country, my bag on my back, a song in my throat, and the gray road stretching straight before me. I remember how eagerly, I looked out across the fields and meadows and rested my eyes upon the distant hills.
How roomy it all was! I looked up into the clear blue of the sky.
There was space here to breathe, and distances in which the spirit might spread its wings. As the old prophet says, it was a place where a man might be placed alone in the midst of the earth.
I was strangely glad that morning of every little stream that ran under the bridges, I was glad of the trees I passed, glad of every bird and squirrel in the branches, glad of the cattle grazing in the fields, glad of the jolly boys I saw on their way to school with their dinner pails, glad of the bluff, red-faced teamster I met, and of the snug farmer who waved his hand at me and wished me a friendly good morning. It seemed to me that I liked every one I saw, and that every one liked me.
So I walked onward that morning, nor ever have had such a sense of relief and escape, nor ever such a feeling of gayety.
"Here is where I belong," I said. "This is my own country. Those hills are mine, and all the fields, and the trees and the sky--and the road here belongs to me as much as it does to any one."
Coming presently to a small house near the side of the road, I saw a woman working with a trowel in her sunny garden. It was good to see her turn over the warm brown soil; it was good to see the plump green rows of lettuce and the thin green rows of onions, and the nasturtiums and sweet peas; it was good--after so many days in that desert of a city--to get a whiff of blossoming things. I stood for a moment looking quietly over the fence before the woman saw me. When at last she turned and looked up, I said:
"Good morning."
She paused, trowel in hand.
"Good morning," she replied; "you look happy."
I wasn't conscious that I was smiling outwardly.
"Well, I am," I said; "I'm going home."
"Then you OUGHT to be happy," said she.
"And I'm glad to escape THAT," and I pointed toward the city.
"What?"
"Why, that old monster lying there in the valley."
I could see that she was surprised and even a little alarmed. So I began intently to admire her young cabbages and comment on the perfection of her geraniums. But I caught her eying me from time to time as I leaned there on the fence, and I knew that she would come back sooner or later to my remark about the monster. Having shocked your friend (not too unpleasantly), abide your time, and he will want to be shocked again. So I was not at all surprised to hear her ask:
"Have you travelled far?"
"I should say so!" I replied. "I've been on a very long journey.
I've seen many strange sights and met many wonderful people."
"You may have been in California, then. I have a daughter in California."
"No," said I, "I was never in California."
"You've been a long time from home, you say?"
"A very long time from home."
"How long?"
"Three weeks."
"Three weeks! And how far did you say you had travelled?"
"At the farthest point, I should say sixty miles from home."
"But how can you say that in travelling only sixty miles and being gone three weeks that you have seen so many strange places and people?"
"Why," I exclaimed, "haven't you seen anything strange around here?'"
"Why, no--" glancing quickly around her.
"Well, I'm strange, am I not?"
"Well--"
"And you're strange."
She looked at me with the utmost amazement. I could scarcely keep from laughing.
"I assure you," I said, "that if you travel a thousand miles you will find no one stranger than I am--or you are--nor anything more wonderful than all this" and I waved my hand.
This time she looked really alarmed, glancing quickly toward the house, so that I began to laugh.
"Madam," I said, "good morning!"
So I left her standing there by the fence looking after me, and I went on down the road.
"Well," I said, "she'll have something new to talk about. It may add a month to her life. Was there ever such an amusing world!"
About noon that day I had an adventure that I have to laugh over every time I think of it. It was unusual, too, as being almost the only incident of my journey which was of itself in the least thrilling or out of the ordinary. Why, this might have made an item in the country paper!
For the first time on my trip I saw a man that I really felt like calling a tramp--a tramp in the generally accepted sense of the term. When I left home I imagined I should meet many tramps, and perhaps learn from them odd and curious things about life; but when I actually came into contact with the shabby men of the road, I began to be puzzled. What was a tramp, anyway?
I found them all strangely different, each with his own distinctive history, and each accounting for himself as logically as I could for myself. And save for the fact that in none of them I met were the outward graces and virtues too prominently displayed, I have come back quite uncertain as to what a scientist might call type-characteristics. I had thought of following Emerson in his delightfully optimistic definition of a weed. A weed, he says, is a plant whose virtues have not been discovered. A tramp, then, is a man whose virtues have not been discovered. Or, I might follow my old friend the Professor (who dearly loves all growing things) in his even kindlier definition of a weed. He says that it is merely a plant misplaced. The virility of this definition has often impressed me when I have tried to grub the excellent and useful horseradish plants out of my asparagus bed! Let it be then--a tramp is a misplaced man, whose virtues have not been discovered.
Whether this is an adequate definition or not, it fitted admirably the man I overtook that morning on the road. He was certainly misplaced, and during my brief but exciting experience with him I discovered no virtues whatever.
